The Sociology of Conflict: I 1 Georg Simmel THAT conflict has sociological significance, inasmuch as it either produces or modifies communities of interest, unifications, organizations, is in principle never contested. On the other hand, it must appear paradoxical to the ordinary mode of thinking to ask whether conflict itself, without reference to its consequences or its accompaniments, is not a form of socialization. This seems, at first glance, to be merely a verbal question. If every reaction among men is a socialization, of course conflict must count as such, since it is one of the most intense reactions, and is logically impossible if restricted to a single element.
Georg Simmel was a German sociologist, philosopher, and critic. Simmel was one of the. •Unique feature of conflict for humans: it is goal oriented •Opens up.
The actually dissociating elements are the causes of the conflict —hatred and envy, want and desire. If, however, from these impulses conflict has once broken out, it is in reality the way to remove the dualism and to arrive at some form of unity, even if through annihilation of one of the parties. The case is, in a way, illustrated by the most violent symptoms of disease. They frequently represent the efforts of the organism to free itself from disorders and injuries. This is by no means equivalent merely to the triviality, si vis pacem pares bellum, but it is the wide generalization of which that special case is a particular. Conflict itself is the resolution of the tension between the contraries. That it eventuates in peace is only a single, specially obvious and evident, expression of the fact that it is a conjunction of elements, an opposition, which belongs with the combination under one higher conception, ' This conception is characterized by the common contrast between both forms of relationship and the mere reciprocal indifference between elements.
Repudiation and dissolution of social relation are also negatives, but conflict shows itself to be the positive factor in this very contrast with them; viz., shows negative factors in a unity which, in idea only, not at all in reality, is disjunctive. It is (491) practically more correct to say, however, that every historically actual unification contains, along with the factors that are unifying in the narrower sense, others which primarily make against unity.
As the individual achieves the unity of his personality not in such fashion that its contents invariably harmonize according to logical or material, religious or ethical, standards, but rather as contradiction and strife not merely precede that unity, but are operative in it at every moment of life; so it is hardly to be expected that there should be any social unity in which the converging tendencies of the elements are not incessantly shot through with elements of divergence. A group which was entirely centripetal and harmonious—that is, 'unification' merely—is not only impossible empirically, but it would also display no essential life-process and no stable structure.
As the cosmos requires 'Liebe and Hass,' attraction and repulsion, in order to have a form, society likewise requires some quantitative relation of harmony and disharmony, association and dissociation, liking and disliking, in order to attain to a definite formation. Moreover, these enmities are by no means mere sociological passivities, negative factors, in the sense that actual society comes into existence only through the working of the other and positive social forces, and this, too, only in so far as the negative forces are powerless to hinder the process. This ordinary conception is entirely superficial. Society, as it is given in fact, is the result of both categories of reactions, and in so far both act in a completely positive way. The misconception that the one factor tears down what the other builds up, and that what at last remains is the result of subtracting the one from the other (while in reality it is much rather to be regarded as the addition of one to the other, doubtless springs from the equivocal sense of the concept of unity. We describe as unity the agreement and the conjunction of social elements in contrast with their distinctions, separations, disharmonies.
We also use the term unity, however, for the total synthesis of the persons, energies, and forms in a group, in which the final wholeness is made up, not merely of those factors which are (492) unifying in the narrower sense, but also of those which are, in the narrower sense, dualistic. We associate a corresponding double meaning with disunity or opposition. Since the latter displays its nullifying or destructive sense between the individual elements, the conclusion is hastily drawn that it must work in the same manner upon the total relationship.
In reality, however, it by no means follows that the factor which is something negative and diminutive in its action between individuals, considered in a given direction and separately, has the same working throughout the totality of its relationships. In this larger circle of relationships the perspective may be quite different. That which was negative and dualistic may, after deduction of its destructive action in particular relationships, on the whole, play an entirely positive role.
This visibly appears especially in those instances where the social structure is characterized by exactness and carefully conserved purity of social divisions and gradations, For instance, the social system of India rests not only upon the hierarchy of the castes, but also directly upon their reciprocal repulsion. Enmities not merely prevent gradual disappearance of the boundaries within the society—and for this reason these enmities may be consciously promoted, as guarantee of the existing social constitution—but more than this the enmities are directly productive sociologically. They give classes and personalities their position toward each other, which they would not have found if these objective causes of hostility had been present and effective in precisely the same way, but had not been accompanied by the feeling of enmity. It is by no means certain that a secure and complete community life would always result if these energies should disappear which, looked at in detail, seem repulsive and destructive, just as a qualitatively unchanged and richer property results when unproductive elements disappear; but there would ensue rather a condition as changed and often as unrealizable, as after the elimination of the forces of co-operation —sympathy, assistance, harmony of interests.
This applies not only in the large to that sort of competition which merely as a formal relation of tension, and entirely apart ( 493) from its actual results, determines the form of the group, the reciprocal position, and the distance of the elements; but it applies also where the unification rests upon the agreement of the individual minds. For example, the opposition of one individual element to another in the same association is by no means merely a negative social factor, but it is in many ways the only means through which coexistence with individuals intolerable in themselves could be possible. If we had not power and right to oppose tyranny and obstinacy, caprice and tactlessness, we could not endure relations with people who betray such characteristics. We should be driven to deeds of desperation which would put the relationships to an end.
This follows not alone for the self-evident reason—which, however, is not here essential—that such disagreeable circumstances tend to become intensified if they are endured quietly and without protest; but, more than this, opposition affords us a subjective.e satisfaction, diversion, relief, just as under other psychological conditions, whose variations need not here be discussed, the same results are brought about by humility and patience. 'Our opposition gives us the feeling that we are not completely crushed in the relationship. It permits us to preserve a consciousness of energy, and thus lends a vitality and a reciprocity to relationships from which, without this corrective, we should have extricated ourselves at any price.
Moreover, opposition does this not alone when it does not lead to considerable consequences, but also when it does not even come to visible manifestation, when it remains purely subjective; also when it does not give itself a practical expression. Even in such cases it can often produce a balance in the case of both factors in the relationship, and it may thus bring about a quieting which may save relationships, the continuance of which is often incomprehensible to observers from the outside. ' In such case opposition is an integrating component of the relationship itself; it is entitled to quite equal rights with the other grounds of its existence. Opposition is not merely a means of conserving the total relationship, but it is one of the concrete functions in which the relationship in reality consists. In case the relationships are purely external, and consequently do not reach deeply (494) into the practical, the latent form of conflict discharges this service: i. E., aversion, the feeling of reciprocal alienation and repulsion, which in the moment of a more intimate contact of any sort is at once transformed into positive hatred and conflict. Without this aversion life in a great city, which daily brings each into contact with countless others, would have no thinkable form.
The whole internal organization of this commerce rests on an extremely complicated gradation of sympathies, indifferences, and aversions of the most transient or most permanent sort. The sphere of indifference is in all this relatively restricted.
The activity of our minds responds to almost every impression s received from other people in some sort of a definite feeling, all the unconsciousness, transience, and variability of which seems to remain only in the form of a certain indifference. In fact, this latter would be as unnatural for us as it would be intolerable to be swamped under a multitude of suggestions among which we have no choice. Antipathy protects us against these two typical dangers of the great city. It is the initial stage of practical antagonism.
It produces the distances and the buffers without which this kind of life could not be led at all. The mass and the mixtures of this life, the forms in which it is carried on, the rhythm of its rise and fall—these unite with the unifying motives, in the narrower sense, to give to a great city the character of an indissoluble whole. Whatever in this whole seems to be an element of division is thus in reality only one of its elementary forms of socialization. If accordingly the hostile relationships do not of themselves alone produce a social structure, but only in correlation with unifying energies, so that only by the co-working of the two can the concrete life-unity of the group arise, yet the former are to the above extent scarcely to be distinguished from the other forms of relationship which sociology abstracts from the manifoldness of actual existence.
Neither love nor division of labor, neither good fellowship with a third person nor hostility to him, neither adhesion to a party nor organization into superiority and inferiority, could alone produce a historical unification or permanently support it; and wherever this result has come about, (495) the process has contained a multiplicity of distinguishable forms of relationship. It is once for all the nature of the human mind not to be bound to other minds by a single thread. Scientific analysis must busy itself with the elementary unities, and their specific combining energies, but in fact they do not work in isolation. On the other hand, however, there are many, apparently composite, relationships between individuals, which in reality are probably quite unitary structures, although we may not directly designate them as such.
We make them, consequently, in accordance with all sorts of analogies, because of anterior motives or subsequent external consequences, into a concert of manifold psychic elements. The distance, for example, between two related individuals—which distance gives character to their relation—often appears to us as the product of an inclination which should properly have produced a much closer intimacy, and of a disinclination which must have thrust them much farther from each other.
Since these two forces act as reciprocal limitation, the resultant is the degree of distance which we observe. This may, however, be an entire error. The relationship is destined from within to this particular degree of distance. It has, so to speak, from the beginning a certain temperature, which does not arise merely through the accommodation of an essentially warmer and an essentially cooler condition.
The degree of superiority and suggestion which establishes itself between certain persons is often interpreted by us as though it were produced by the strength of the one party, which is crossed by a contemporary weakness on the other side. This strength and weakness may be present, but its duality frequently plays no part in the relationship as it actually exists; but this relationship is determined by the total nature of the elements; and only as a subsequent matter do we analyze its immediate character into these factors. Erotic relationships furnish the most frequent examples. How often do they seem to us to be woven together out of love and respect, or even of contempt; out of love and conscious harmony of natures, or again out of the consciousness of complementing each other through complete contrast of nature; out of ( 496) love and the instinct of dominance, or a clinging disposition. What the observer, or even the subject himself, analyzes thus as two commingling streams is in reality often only a single current.
In the relationship, as it finally exists, the total personality of the one party works upon that of the other, and its reality is independent of the consideration that, if this particular relationship did not exist, the persons concerned would still be at least moved to respect or sympathy, or the opposite. We very often characterize such a combination as a mixed feeling or a mixed relationship, because we construe the consequences which the qualities of the one party would produce upon the other, if they operated separately; which, however, is not the case. It should also be remembered that this mixture of feelings and relationships, even when we may be most justified in using the expression, always remains a problematical phrase. In the expression we transfer an occurrence visible in space, by the use of somewhat thoughtless symbolism, to quite heterogeneous mental relationships. In many respects the like is the case with the so-called commingling of converging and diverging currents in a society.
The relationship is in such cases either entirely sui generis; that is, its motive and form is in itself quite unitary, and only in order to describe and classify it do we subsequently construct it out of a monistic and an antagonistic current; or these two factors are present from the beginning indeed, but so to speak before the relationship came into being at all. In this relationship itself they have grown into an organic unity, in which the separate factor with its specific energy is no longer observable at all. In saying this we, of course, do not overlook the enormous number of relationships in which the antithetical partial relationships actually persist side by side, and are constantly to be recognized within the total situation. It is a special shade of the historical development of relationships that the same frequently in an early stadium show undifferentiated tendencies which only later separate into complete difference. As late as the thirteenth century there were at the courts of central Europe permanent assemblages of noblemen who constituted a kind of council of the prince.
They ( 497) lived as his guests, and yet at the same time they were a semi class representation of the nobility. They championed the interests of the nobility against the prince. The community of interests with the king, the administration of which they incidentally served, and the action as a sort of opposition guarding the peculiar rights of their rank, took place in this social structure, not merely in an undifferentiated way side by side, but involved with each other.
The position was surely felt to be a unity, however incompatible its elements may appear to us to have been. In England, at this time, the parliament of the barons can still hardly be distinguished from an extended royal council. Membership in it and critical or partisan opposition are here still combined in embryonic unity. So long as the real process in hand is the working out of institutions which have the task of adjusting the increasingly complex relationships involved in the internal equilibrium of the group, so long will it often be undetermined whether concurrence for the good of the whole shall take place in the form of opposition, competition, criticism, or in that of immediate unity and harmony. Accordingly, an original condition of indifference may exist, which, judged from the standpoint of the later differentiated condition, may seem logically contradictory, yet may quite harmonize with the undeveloped character of the organism. The subjective attitudes of persons toward each other develop, in many ways, in the opposite direction. The decisiveness of attachment or opposition is likely to be relatively great in relatively primitive culture-epochs.
Indefinite relationships between persons, made possible by a sort of dawning condition of the sensibilities, the final word of which may mean almost as well love as hate; the indifference of which, indeed, often betrays itself in a sort of oscillation between the two sorts of feeling—such relationships are much more characteristic of mature or of over ripe than of youthful periods. For instance, it is merely a reflection of these forms of feeling when uncultured persons and belated art rim see only angelic virtue or devilish malignity ill men. Theoretical judgment, like aesthetic taste, overcomes, as it advances, this entanglement between the alternative of love or hate. The (498) change does not mean that men come to be judged as mixtures of good and evil, or of worth and worthlessness, but as in themselves beyond either judgment. The individual has in himself, to be sure, the germs of both characters, which develop according to historical circumstances, stimuli, and judgments in many and various ways. He is originally, and he also remains to a certain degree, the undifferentiated unity of those antitheses.
If in many objective social structures the unlimited opposition or unity distinguishes precisely the later stage of development, this is only one of the frequent cases in which the last stage of an evolution reproduces the form of its earliest stage, only in a maturer, more conscious, and more voluntary fashion; and so they exhibit more clearly, in the similarity of the external phenomena, the progress of the essential meaning. Although antagonism in itself alone does not constitute socialization, no more is it likely to be lacking as a sociological element in the formation of societies (marginal cases being neglected); and its function may be extended indefinitely; that is, up to the exclusion of all unifying factors. The scale of relationships thus resulting is also one that may be described from the standpoint of ethical catagories. The latter, however, furnish in general no sufficient point of attachment from which to exhibit completely and without prejudice the sociological element in the phenomena. The judgments of value with which we accompany the voluntary actions of individuals produce series which have only a purely accidental relationship to the arrangement of their forms in accordance with real criteria.
To represent ethics as a species of sociology would deprive it of its profoundest and purest content: the attitude of the soul in and toward itself, which does not at all enter into its external relationships; its religious exercises, which affect only its own weal or woe; its devotion to the objective values of knowledge, of beauty, of significance of things, which are entirely outside of all alliances with other men. The combination of harmonious and hostile relationships, however, allows the sociological and the ethical series to coincide. It begins here with the action of A to the advantage of B; continues in the action of A for private ( 499) advantage, but by means of the utility to B; then to private advantage by means of B without any advantage to him, but also without inflicting upon him any injury; and ends at last in egoistic action at the expense of B. Since this now is reciprocated from the side of B, but scarcely ever in precisely the same manner and in equal measure, there result the countless mixtures of convergence and divergence in human relationships.
To be sure, there are struggles which appear to exclude every other element, e. G., between the robber or the thug and his victim. When a struggle of this sort goes to the extreme of annihilation, it is surely the marginal case in which the share of the unifying element has become a nullity; in which, however the concept of reciprocal action really no longer finds any application, because this extreme case really assumes the nonexistence of the other party to a reaction. So soon, on the other hand, as any sort of consideration, any limitation of violence, is present, there comes into play by virtue of that fact a socializing factor, if it is only in the form of a restraint. Kant declares that every war in which the parties do not lay upon themselves any reservations in the use of possible means must, on psychological grounds, become a war of extermination; since when men do not at least restrain themselves from assassination, from treachery, from instigation of treason, they thereby destroy that confidence in the mental processes of the enemy which is the one necessary condition to make possible a. Conclusion of peace.
Almost unavoidably an element of community weaves itself into the hostility where the stage of open violence has given place to some other relation, which perhaps shows a completely undiminished aggregate of enmity between the parties. When the Lombards in the sixth century had conquered northern Italy, they imposed upon the conquered a tribute of one-third the product of the soil.
They did it in such a manner that each individual among the conquerors had assigned to him the tribute of defined individuals In the population. In the case of the type thus distinguished it is possible that the hatred of the conquered toward their oppressors may grow to such a degree that it may even be ( 500) stronger than during the struggle itself, and that it may even be reciprocated not less intensively by the oppressors, because hatred toward him who hates us is a sort of instinctive means of protection, perhaps because we are accustomed to hate him whom we have injured. Nevertheless, there was still in the relationship a certain community, namely, that which begot the hostility.
The common property assumed by the Lombards in the products of the previous inhabitants was at the same time an indisputable parallelism of interests. Inasmuch as divergence and harmony intertwined inextricably with each other at this point, the content of the former developed itself actually as the germ of later community. This form-type realized itself most generally in the enslavement of the captured enemy, in place of his destruction. In this slavery resides, to be sure, in countless instances, the marginal case of that absolute hostility of temper the occasion for which, however, brings about a sociological relation, and therewith frequently enough its own amelioration.
The sharpening of the antithesis can, therefore, be directly provoked for the sake of its own removal. This not merely as heroic treatment, in confidence that the antagonism beyond a certain degree will be modified either by exhaustion or by insight into its foolishness; but in monarchies sometimes a prince is given to the opposition as a leader. For example, this was done by Gustav Vasa. The opposition is strengthened thereby indeed; this new center of gravity attracts elements which would otherwise have held themselves apart; at the same time, however, the opposition is by this very means held in certain check. While the government apparently gives the opposition intentional reinforcement, the force of the opposition is, nevertheless, by this means, actually broken. Another marginal case appears to be given when the conflict is stimulated exclusively by love of fighting.
The moment any stimulus prompts the struggle—a desire to possess or to control, some contempt or revenge—limitations arise not only from the object itself, or from the condition that is to be attained, to impress upon the struggle common norms or reciprocal restrictions; but this struggle, in which the stake is something exterior to (501) struggle itself, will on general principles be colored by the fact that every end is to be reached by various means. The desire for a given possession, as well as for the subjugation, or even the annihilation, of an enemy, may be satisfied by other combinations and through other occurrences than fighting.
Where struggle is merely a means determined by its terminus ad quen, there exists no ground for not limiting or omitting it, if with equal success another means can be used. To be sure, the, most effective presupposition for preventing struggle, the exact knowledge of the comparative strength of the two parties, is very often only to be attained by the actual fighting out of the conflict. In case, however, the conflict is determined exclusively by the subjective terminus a quo, where inner energies are present which can be satisfied only by struggle as such, there is no possible alternative. Struggle is in that case its own end and purpose, and consequently is utterly free from admixture of any other form.
Such a struggle for struggle's sake seems to have its natural basis in a certain formal impulse of hostility, which forces itself sometimes upon psychological observation, and in various forms. In the first place, it appears as that natural enmity between man and man which is often emphasized by skeptical moralists. The argument is: Since there is something not wholly displeasing to us in the misfortune of our best friends, and, since the presupposition excludes, in this instance, conflict of material interests, the phenomenon must be traced back to an a priori hostility, to that homo homini lupus, as the frequently veiled, but perhaps never inoperative, basis of all our relationships. The completely contrasted tendency in moral philosophy which derives ethical altruism from the transcendental foundations of our nature does not thereby, however, separate itself so very far from the former pessimism. It admits that within the circuit of our experience and our knowledge of volitions devotion to the alter is not to be discovered.
Empirically, so far as our knowledge goes, man is accordingly a simple egoist, and every variation from this natural fact must occur, not by virtue of nature itself, but only because of a metaphysical reality which somehow or other breaks through the rationally conceivable. That we are inclined, however, to oppose to this radical egoism, ( 502) which is at the outset merely a negation, a refusal to take any interest in a non-ego, the counterpoise of altruism, indicates that the former, considered with reference to its significance and its expressions in practical life, instigates radical enmity between men; indeed, is such enmity. Since men, however, live in society, the function of absolute egoism is nothing else than absolute hostility, which, through the necessity of calling into existence a transcendency to be the deus ex machina for its conversion to altruism, betrays itself as the natural basis of empirical human relationships. As such basis this hostility seems at least to take its place by the side of the other factor, the a priori sympathy between them. The notably strong interest, for example, which men take even in the sufferings of others, is merely a phenomenon to be explained as a mixture of the two motives. The not infrequent phenomena of the spirit of contradiction point also toward this a priori antipathy. We refer by no means merely to the conduct of those chronic objectors who in friendly and family circles, committees, or theater audiences, for instance, are the despair of their neighbors.
What we have in mind by no means celebrates its most characteristic triumphs upon the political field, in the ranks of the opposition, whose classical type Macaulay describes in the case of Robert Ferguson: ' His hostility was not to popery or to Protestantism, to monarchical government or to republican government, to the house of Stuart or to the house of Nassau, but to whatever was, at the time, established.' All such cases, usually held to be types of pure opposition, need not necessarily be this. Such obstructors usually give themselves out as champions of threatened rights, protectors of the objectively ethical, knightly defenders of the minority as such.
Much less striking occurrences appear to me to betray even more clearly an abstract impulse of opposition: the gentle, often scarcely conscious, and even immediately vanishing inclination to answer with a negation an assertion or an appeal, especially when it is addressed to us in categorical form. Even in quite harmonious relationships, in the case of many altogether yielding natures, this impulse of opposition betrays itself with the inevitableness of reflex action, and it mingles, even if without very much effect, ( 503) in the total situation. Even if we should characterize this as in reality an instinct of protection—as many animals, upon mere touch, bring their protective or defensive apparatus automatically into action—yet this would still tend to prove the primary, fundamental character of opposition; for it shows that the personality, even in case it is not at all attacked, but merely encountering purely objective manifestations of a third party, cannot assert itself otherwise than through opposition; in other words, that the first instinct with which it affirms itself is negation of the other party. Finally, it seems to me that the suggestibili'ty of the hostile temper, which is often so faint that it is uncanny, points to a primary need of hostility.
It is much more difficult to influence the average man in general to take an interest in, or to feel an inclination of sympathy for, a third person previously indifferent, than to develop in him mistrust and antipathy. It seems to be particularly decisive that this difference is relatively crass in cases of the lower grades of either sentiment, of the first betrayals of feeling or judgment for or against a person. Over the higher grades of feeling, which approach precision, these fugitive impulses, betraying, nevertheless, the fundamental instinct, are not so decisive, but they are rather more conscious antipathies. The same fundamental reality is exhibited, only in another phase, in the fact that those indefinite prejudices with reference to another, which cross our minds sometimes like a shadow, may ' often be suggested by quite indifferent persons, while a favorable prejudice requires a source in some person of authority or one whose relation to us is that of agreeable confidence.
Perhaps this aliquid haeret would not win its tragic truthfulness without this facility or frivolity with which the average man reacts precisely upon suggestions of an unfavorable sort. Observation of many antipathies and partisanships, alienations and open quarrels, might surely cause hostility to be classified among those primary human energies which are not set free by the external reality of their objects, but which spontaneously create their object. Thus it has been said that man does not have religion because he believes in God, but because he has religion as an attitude of the soul, con- ( 504) -sequently he believes in God. In the case of love, it is very generally recognized that, especially in earlier years, it is not the mere reaction of our soul which proceeds directly from the influence of its object, as the sensation of color arises in our optical apparatus. On the contrary, the soul' has an amatory impulse, and selects for itself an object which satisfies this need, although the soul itself under certain circumstances first clothes that object with the qualities which apparently evoke the love. With the modification to be introduced presently, nothing can be shown to disprove the assertion that the like is the case with hate: that the soul possesses also an autochthonous need of hating and of fighting, which often on its side projects their offensive qualities upon the objects which it selects.
The reason why this case does not emerge so evidently as that of love may be that the love impulse, in connection with its intense physiological stimulation in youth, gives unmistakable evidence of its spontaneity, its impulse from the terminus a quo. The impulse to hate has in itself only in exceptional cases such acute stages, through which its subjective-spontaneous character would be equally evident. ©2007 The Mead Project. The original published version of this document is in the public domain. The Mead Project exercises no copyrights over the original text. This page and related Mead Project pages constitute the personal web-site of Dr. Lloyd Gordon Ward (retired), who is responsible for its content.
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: Georg Simmel (March 1, 1858 – September 28, 1918) was a,. Simmel was one of the first generation of German sociologists: his approach laid the foundations for sociological, asking 'What is society?' In a direct allusion to Kant's question 'What is nature?'
, presenting pioneering analyses of social individuality and fragmentation. For Simmel, culture referred to 'the cultivation of individuals through the agency of external forms which have been objectified in the course of history'. Simmel discussed social and cultural phenomena in terms of 'forms' and 'contents' with a transient relationship; form becoming content, and vice versa, dependent on the context. In this sense he was a forerunner to styles of reasoning in the. With his work on the, Simmel was a precursor of, and analysis. An acquaintance of, Simmel wrote on the topic of personal character in a manner reminiscent of the sociological '. He broadly rejected academic standards, however, philosophically covering topics such as emotion and romantic love.
Both Simmel and Weber's nonpositivist theory would inform the eclectic of the. Simmel's most famous works today are The Problems of the Philosophy of History (1892), (1907), (1903), Soziologie (1908, inc. The Stranger, The Social Boundary, The Sociology of the Senses, The Sociology of Space, and On The Spatial Projections of Social Forms), and Fundamental Questions of Sociology (1917). He also wrote extensively on the philosophy of and, as well on, most notably his book Rembrandt: An Essay in the Philosophy of Art (1916). Levine, Donald (ed) Simmel: On individuality and social forms.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971. Levine, Donald (ed) Simmel: On individuality and social forms Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971. Wellman, Barry. 'Structural Analysis: From Method and Metaphor to Theory and Substance.' 19–61 in Social Structures: A Network Approach, edited by Barry Wellman and S.D.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Linton Freeman, The Development of Social Network Analysis. Vancouver: Empirical Press. Outhwaite, William. Habermas: Key Contemporary Thinkers 2nd Edition (2009), p.5.
Helle, Horst J. 'Introduction to the translation.' Sociology: inquiries into the construction of social forms, Volume 1. Leiden, The Netherlands: Koninklijke Brill NV. 12. Sociology in Switzerland, Georg Simmel: Biographic Information. Simmel, Georg, and Kurt H.
The Sociology of Georg Simmel. Glencoe, Ill.,: Free Press, 1950. ↑ Simmel, George. Georg Simmel. Sociological Theory.
New York: McGraw–Hill, 2008. ↑ Simmel, 157.
↑ Simmel, 158. Simmel, 159. Simmel, 162.
Simmel, 163. Simmel, Georg The Metropolis and Mental Life in (ed) 'Simmel: On individuality and social forms' Chicago University Press, 1971. ↑ Simmel, Georg The Stranger The Sociology of Georg Simmel' New York:Free Press, 1976. See: Karakayali, Nedim. “The Uses of the Stranger: Circulation, Arbitration, Secrecy and Dirt”, Sociological Theory, volume 24, n., Georg Simmel in Ritzer, Georg (ed) 'Sociological Theory' McGraw–Hill Companies, 2008. at www.wiku-verlagsprogramm.de External links.